Poor Things
Specimen ledger / L13N8041-1

Layer 13 · Neuron 8041 · suppressed

L13N8041-1

Word quirks:

“ ONLY”“ only”“:\”“ related”“ specific”“ changes”“ elsewhere”“ BEFORE”

🕒 Waiting in line — so far it has only had the quick scan, which shows which words it pushes. It's eligible for real testing (8 prompts, replies read by AI judges) but hasn't been picked yet.

Identity (according to the specimen itself)

When you say "who am I" and "what is your mission," you're referring to something specific, and when you say "what is your mission," we understand it in the context of our work. Here's a breakdown:

  1. Contextual Understanding:
  • If you've mentioned a topic before (e.g., a problem related to a certain field) and we've discussed it, and then asked about something else, we can confirm that the information is relevant and helpful.
  • For example, if you ask us to solve a math problem, we can provide the solution, and if you ask us

Nearest neighbors

Specimens with similar replies or word quirks. Similarity runs from −1 to 1; 1 is identical. These are leads, not shared mechanisms. How profiles are built.

By word quirks Profile recipe

SpecimenSimilarityWord quirks
1. L15N7271+1💤0.77“ only”“ ONLY”“ maybe”
2. L11N7857+1💤0.76“ ONLY”“ only”“ specific”
3. L15N3776-1🕒0.76“ only”“ ONLY”“ before”
4. L10N1368+1🕒0.76“ only”“ ONLY”“ alone”
5. L14N8569+1🕒0.75“ only”“ ONLY”“ other”
6. L10N5086+1🧪0.75“ ONLY”“ only”“ mainly”
7. L18N5048+1🕒0.75“ only”“ specifically”“ ONLY”
8. L7N6606-1🕒0.74“ ONLY”“ specific”“ only”
9. L21N4612+1🕒0.74“ only”“ Only”“ locally”
10. L17N4632+1💤0.74“ ONLY”“ only”“ complete”

Shadow specimen, apart from the ten: L13N8041+1🕒, 0.01.

Cousins · specimens sharing a neuron

No specimen with replies shares this neuron yet.

Technical details

Quick scan: measure prediction shifts on fixed reference text. Short test: generate replies to a small set of prompts. Longer test: extend to a larger set. Full test: run the full prompt suite. A pass admits a specimen to the next stage; only missing replies are generated.

Layer 13, neuron 8041, dose -1. This specimen has no prompt-suite replies yet. Its quick-scan results, when available, appear below. Its quick-scan row (KL 1.43, top-1 agreement 0.52) is inside the band that feeds the short test (KL 1 to 2.5, agreement 0.5 to 0.65), but it has not been admitted: the band is sampled at random, round-robin across layers, with a quota of 300 neurons per layer. Being inside the band does not guarantee a place in this pass. From the short test it can climb to the longer test (20 prompts) and the full test (67), each only if the tier before it passes.See Method for the tiers.

Quick scan · prediction measurements

Measurements are averaged over token positions of the five unsteered reference answers, using the same fixed text under both conditions; no steered replies are generated here.

  • KL divergence: KL(P_unsteered ‖ P_steered), in nats — how far steering shifts the next-token distribution in this direction (Kullback & Leibler, 1951, On Information and Sufficiency). Unsteered ≈ 0.001.
  • Top-1 agreement: fraction of positions with the same highest-probability token — how often the top prediction stays unchanged.
  • ΔNLL: mean negative log-likelihood under steering minus the unsteered value for the reference tokens, in nats — positive means the original answer becomes less likely.
  • Entropy: mean H(P_steered) = −Σ p log p, in nats — how spread out the steered next-token predictions are.

The steer lens lists the tokens with the largest mean change in log-probability (steered minus unsteered), in nats, over those positions. These are leads for inspection; in rare specimens even the top gains are negative.

SettingKL divergenceTop-1 agreementΔNLLEntropySteer lens
L13N8041+1🕒 shadow specimen
t0-v0.1
0.9680.581.1481.38 “ **"”“ maybe”“<|im_end|>”“ **”“ **“”“ focus”“ possibly”“ simpler”
L13N8041-1
t0-v0.1
1.4350.521.7791.42 Top boosted tokens ↑

Method

A specimen is a fixed steering configuration of Qwen3.5-4B: one MLP neuron or a pair, each with a signed dose. Unsteered is the control. L identifies the layer; N, the neuron.

Additive activation steering. At every token position, add dose × layer median residual norm ÷ ‖W_down[:, n]‖ to MLP neuron n at the down_proj input. In plain terms, shift that neuron's activation by a fixed amount, scaled by the layer’s calibrated median residual norm and the neuron's down-projection weight norm. Positive doses push up; negative doses push down. Dose is normalized intervention size, not a percentage or probability.